In order to get a credit card or a loan, you have to have credit. The paradoxical problem means the 63 million Americans who are unbanked or underbanked have limited options for pathways toward financial wellness. The problem doesn’t stop at credit cards and loans either. Having low or no credit can also be a major barrier to a number of living essentials. For instance, many property companies won’t approve renters for an apartment if they don’t have good credit or don’t make three times the monthly rent price. The bottom line is if you’re young or have poor credit, you’re often outright excluded from many financial services, which further breeds inequity among class, gender, race and sexuality.
Altro, a free credit-building platform that just closed $18 million in a Series A round, is trying to bridge this financial gap. The company leverages payment history data on purchases users are already regularly making, such as online subscriptions, to help build credit and improve their financial wellness. For instance, every time a user pays their Netflix bill, Altro reports that payment to credit bureaus to help increase their score.
The app also helps users improve their overall financial wellness through a literacy catalog of more than 350 snippets of educational content. Financial education resources range from cryptocurrency and investing to trading, all with the goal of helping users become more financially savvy.
Altro co-founder and CEO Michael Broughton started the company after his own experience of being excluded from financial services when trying to pay for college. He’d been accepted to the University of Southern California (USC) but was $10,000 short on tuition. While Broughton applied for multiple types of loans, he kept getting denied due to his family’s financial situation and his lack of credit history. Eventually, after a lot of persuasion, USC closed the gap themselves and Broughton was able to enroll.
“It definitely sparked a yearn to solve this problem that I realized not just I, myself, face, but millions of people face and in very unique situations. That’s what started the discovery phase of Altro,” Broughton told Built In in an interview.
He went on to say that he met his co-founder and now Altro’s CEO Ayush Jain in a USC entrepreneur class where Altro’s story really kicked-off.
Originally, the app launched as Perch in 2020 with a spike of sign-ups — amassing a 200,000-person waitlist and skyrocketing it to the top 10 on the App Store. As much as Broughton liked the brand, it just didn’t feel right for the company. The Perch brand featured soft purple and white, conveying comfort, something the company’s mission simply didn’t fit.
“We realized what we were doing was really breaking the status quo; we were anything but soft. We’re changing the norm, we’re making noise in the space that really doesn’t want to hear us,” Broughton said. “Our users felt the same way. We are taking people who were purposely undermining and putting them into the financial world.”
Needless to say, the name Perch had to go and Altro — meaning “other” in Italian — became a perfect new identity for the company.
Today, Altro is a thriving business and looking to grow with the help of new capital. The recent Series A round was led by Pendulum with participation from Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners. To date, the company has raised approximately $21 million. Other notable funding partners include Dick Parson’s Equity Alliance and R&R Ventures, Citi Ventures, Black Capital and Concrete Rose.
Altro plans to use its newest capital to build out its catalog of financial education content. According to Broughton, the platform plans to add content featuring some of its celebrity investors. The funding will also go toward hiring initiatives for product development. Currently, the company is hiring across departments and hopes to grow its team from 40 people to between 70 and 100 by the end of the year.
One exciting new feature Broughton shared exclusively with Built In is that Altro plans to launch free banking services in June to address the unbanked and banking desert crisis. This will allow those who would otherwise not be able to obtain a banking account to start building credit.
